DADulthood

A bit of background: my son (we’ll call him B) is 6 years old. He’s very quiet and polite, but sometimes has trouble sticking up for himself. He takes a bit to warm up to someone, but when he does, he’s very sweet.

Anyway, last month we’re on a trip to visit my wife’s family on the other side of the Pacific ocean for a family reunion. There, my son meets my wife’s 8 y.o nephew, who we’ll call J. They get along straight away, playing video games and sharing toys and sitting beside each other in the car every where we go.

However, it doesn’t take long before J gets comfortable having a little brother around and starts becoming a bit of a brat. He starts ordering B around, playing unfairly, talking down to my son and blaming him for every time he’s punished by his parents. Now since I’m on vacation, I’m there to see it all, and for the most part my son isn’t instigating any of this (I’m not being a biased parent, I swear).

It broke my heart to watch B play games just to lose against J (everything was a competition and J had to beat B or else he’d throw a fit). Regardless, B would still look to play with J first thing every morning, and would always look to share any gifts he got from relatives or make sure his cousin J gets ice cream too when we go out. B even gave J his spare Nintendo DS stylus so they could play Mario Party together (which of course J had to win at or else he wouldn’t play).

Anyway, 3 weeks of that go by and I’ve almost had enough by the time we got to the airport to go home. Standing in the check-in line, they were playing tag. Every time B was “it”, J would say ‘no tag backs’ or 'I’m paused’ every time B would tag J. Well, we get checked in and head to the security gate where we say our goodbyes to my brother-in law’s-family. After hugs and tears, we start heading into the gate, but my son turns around and sprints after J, tags him in the back and yells out “You’re it!” before running back to us and through the gate where his cousin would have no chance to tag him back. Separated by the largest ocean in the world, my son definitely got the last laugh and I was the proudest dad that day.